Language learning is not my strong suit, as my French and Latin teachers, and even my 3-year-old Czech-speaking granddaughter, could attest. (She was so appalled with our practice at singing Happy Birthday in Czech for her mother she made me go solo when the cake arrived. Her mama was more generous.)
But my language ineptitude and limited vocabulary does not stop me loving Māori, spoken or sung.
I do not feel threatened by increasing use of it, or by the prominence of Māori for government department names, place names, on passports, or road signs.
I do not understand why anyone else gets their knickers in a twist about such things.
Where is the harm? Why is it scary?
Why is this government hellbent on going backwards on official language use, rather than celebrating resurgence of our country’s language and encouraging it at every turn, after our appalling treatment of it (and its speakers) in earlier decades?
Earlier this year, after attending several school visits with my almost 5-year-old grandson, I bored anyone prepared to listen with my excitement at the way Māori language was incorporated into the start of the day.
Each of the pupils was asked, in Māori, how they were as the roll was called. Some answered in English, others in Māori. It didn’t matter.
Several of the pupils described themselves as being ngenge (tired). That was a new word to me, but even my old brain could work out what it meant.
When one pupil said he was feeling hōhā, that drew a surprised reaction from the teacher and prompted some discussion about whether he was bored or irritated.
Of course I did not stay all day in that classroom, as much as I would have loved to, but I would be surprised if there were not many other occasions during the day when Māori was incorporated seamlessly into whatever was going on.
It makes me wildly envious. There was none of that during my monocultural primary schooling, and my own children would have had limited exposure to te reo Māori as well.
But that small experience at my grandson’s school gave me hope that for my mokopuna, the Māori language will be an accepted and valued part of their lives and the education system might support them to go on to be fluent speakers.
However, my optimism has been dented over the nonsensical nitpicking over the use of Māori words in early readers in the structured literacy programme.
In New Zealand, adults and children use a range of Māori words in their everyday spoken language — think kia ora, whānau, mahi, wahine, tamariki, kia kaha to name a few.
But our new-entrant classes have been deemed unable to cope with the inclusion of a few Māori words in reading books, even though it has been acknowledged they are likely to be familiar with these words.
It seems particularly silly to be removing Māori words from a book called At the Marae.
The zealotry with which Education Minister Erica Stanford is pursuing structured literacy concerns me.
What she seems to be telling the world is that there is only one way children learn to read and that way must be rigidly followed.
The idea that our children, like my grandson, and my already bilingual granddaughter, will struggle to read words they know in spoken language which follow a different pattern from an otherwise highly prescriptive text underestimates their flexibility and capacity for learning.
Despite the protestations of Ms Stanford, this sanctioning of the removal of Māori words looks more like a feeble excuse to further undermine the language, rather than anything which would stand up to academic or even practical scrutiny.
As someone who spent years as a teacher aide working with pupils who struggled with reading, and later as a literacy tutor with adults in the same position, I learned to appreciate different learning styles.
I also learned not to take for granted what learners might already know or not know and to encourage them to use whatever cues they found useful.
Working with subject matter which was familiar or interesting to them was vital.
It worries me that lack of flexibility in the structured learning system will not serve all pupils well, but that teachers may be discouraged from using a different approach with those pupils.
And when some pupils still struggle to read, and by reading I mean understanding what they read rather than just decoding words and what is called barking at text, as no doubt they will, who or what will get the blame?
Teachers, parents, too many Māori words ... .
It makes me want to weep.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
